From today's New York Times...
John Templeton, Investor, Dies at 95
John M. Templeton, a Tennessee-born investor and philanthropist who amassed a fortune as a pioneer in global mutual funds, then gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to foster understanding of what he called “spiritual realities,” died on Tuesday in Nassau, the Bahamas, where he had lived for decades. He was 95.
In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Templeton dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that now give away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality and promoted a search for answers to what he called the “Big Questions” in the realms of science, faith, God and the purpose of humanity.
A Yale graduate, a Rhodes scholar, an audacious investor, a Presbyterian who preached open-mindedness and eschewed literal interpretations of Scripture, Mr. Templeton — who began annual meetings with prayers, he said, to clear the minds of shareholders — made billions as a pioneer in his globally diversified Templeton funds, often taking the old advice of “buy low, sell high” to extremes.
As a 26-year-old investor in 1939, when World War II began in Europe, he borrowed $10,000 and bought 100 shares each in 104 companies whose stocks were selling at $1 a share or less; 34 of the companies were in bankruptcy. A few years later, he made large profits on 100 of the companies; four turned out to be worthless.
In 1940, he bought a small investment firm that became Templeton, Dobbrow & Vance, the early foundation of his empire. Mr. Templeton embarked on mutual funds in 1954, establishing the Templeton Growth Fund in Canada to reduce the taxes of many shareholders — Canada then had no capital gains tax — and to emphasize the global reach of its investment strategy. It was one of the first mutual funds to invest globally.
As investor interest widened in the 1950s, he started funds specializing in nuclear energy, chemicals, electronics and technology. In 1959, his firm Templeton Damroth, with five funds and $66 million under management, joined a surge of others in going public.
The flagship Templeton Growth Fund, which was separate from the Templeton Damroth funds, also reported impressive growth, posting a 14.5 percent average annual return from 1954 to 1992; a $10,000 investment, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to $2 million.
Mr. Templeton sold the Templeton family of funds — scores of them, with billions in assets — in 1992, and turned to philanthropies that had engaged him for decades.
John Marks Templeton was born on Nov. 29, 1912, in Winchester, a small Tennessee town 60 miles from Dayton, the scene of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” pitting Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a battle over the theory of evolution versus fundamentalist views of the Creation. Mr. Templeton was only 12 then, but issues in the case dominated his later life; he wrote at least eight books on spiritual matters.
He was raised in a devout Presbyterian household and was the first student in town to go to college. Supporting himself at Yale during the Depression, he graduated near the top of his class in 1934, won a Rhodes scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford and earned a master’s degree in law. He began his Wall Street career in 1937.
That year, he married the former Judith Folk. The couple had three children. His wife died in 1951. In 1958, he married Irene Reynolds Butler, who died in 1993. His daughter, Anne Templeton Zimmerman, died in 2004, and a stepson, Malcolm Butler, died in 1995.
Mr. Templeton is survived by two sons from his first marriage, John M. Jr., of Bryn Mawr, Pa., a retired surgeon and the chairman and president of the John Templeton Foundation, and Christopher, of Colfax, Iowa; a stepdaughter, Wendy Brooks, of Delray Beach, Fla.; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Among his many gifts was the 1983 endowment of Templeton College, a business and management school at Oxford. In 1987, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his philanthropy. After many years on Wall Street, he renounced his American citizenship in the 1960s, became a British subject and moved to the Bahamas, a Commonwealth nation that has long been a tax haven.
Mr. Templeton said his investment record improved after he distanced himself from Wall Street and no longer worried about the tax consequences of his decisions. He was an early investor in Japan in the 1960s and later in Russia, as well as in China and other Asian markets. He sold large holdings before the technology bubble burst in 2000, and warned several years ago that real estate prices were dangerously high.
In Nassau, his net worth swelled into the billions, but his lifestyle remained relatively modest. He drove his own car and spent his days reading, writing and managing his foundation. Visitors were given sandwiches, tea and courtly advice in the afternoon at his white-columned antebellum-style home on Lyford Cay, set on a hillside lush with citrus trees and bougainvillea, overlooking a golf course and the ocean.
No comments:
Post a Comment